Yesterday’s crypto debate between notable industry professionals, including John Mcafee, singled out crypto trading as one of the fundamental barriers to the mainstream adoption of blockchain technology.

The 1-hour debate, hosted by Keith Wareing, included CEO’s from Tokenpay, Omnitude and MFChain, as well as the leading crypto advocate John Mcafee. During the discussion, the panel unanimously accepted early on that cryptocurrency trading and the growing obsession with trying to profit from the crypto markets high volatility, has stolen focus away from engaging in real-world use cases of blockchain technology and promoting them to the rest of the world.

“99.99% of transactions are not used for the real world, they’re used for trading and speculation,” said Derek Capo, CEO of TokenPay.

John Mcafee also argued that there are vast numbers of innovative blockchain-based projects on the market already solving mainstream world problems, but nobody seems to be interested in using these new platforms to replace their existing centralized counterparts because of the pull of the lucrative trading market.

“Blockchain is to enhance our lives not so that we [just] can make money or pay people… [Some] ICOs had functional capabilities which nobody used… The coins associated with each of these projects are the only thing that people are looking at,” said John Mcafee.

Participants have shared a common fear that the current infatuation with crypto coins (tokens) and trading are damaging the image of blockchain technology to potential outside adopters, who are only hearing about the hacks, the scams and the money that people lose on a daily basis.

“When you look at the adoption… there’s got to be a push and pull strategy. Crypto will succumb to being a fad if we keep on trading and talking about trading… we need to have a lot more partnerships together… Where we have the mechanism for businesses and consumers to use it,” said Derek Capo.

Chris Painter, CEO of Omnitude, supported this view and stressed the need to steer away from this aspect of the industry and refocus on making blockchain appealing to the mainstream, by exhibiting the advantages of this new technology in real-world applications.

“The benefits need to outweigh the disadvantages of adoption and that is by creating good use cases and making more people want to use it.”

Interestingly, it seems that one of the major changes that needs to happen before blockchain can achieve mainstream adoption is not changing the behavior of the broader non-crypto community to accept digital assets and blockchain technology going forward, but changing our own behavior as crypto enthusiasts, to help support the growing industry for the utility of everybody rather than satisfying our personal individual financial goals.